Intergenerational Transfers and the Accumulation of Wealth

Gale, William G.; Scholz, John Karl

doi:10.1257/jep.8.4.145

Cited by 462 publications

(267 citation statements)

References 10 publications

(10 reference statements)

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“…Empirical evidence provided by studies such as Cox and Raines (1985) and Gale and Scholz (1994) does indeed suggest that there is substantial underreporting of private transfers, and particularly so for transfers received. As noted by Kessler and Masson (1989, p. 148), this might be attributed to "people's tendency to admit more easily that they have given than that they have received".…”

Section: The Effect Of Religiosity On Income Inequalitymentioning

confidence: 97%

“…In this paper, the results we report use the "belief in afterlife" index reported by the World Values Survey conducted in 2000 as the relevant measure of religiosity due to its proximity to our theoretical modeling of religion in the previous section. 12 As the measure of inequality, we use the Gini index from the UNDP. The data on tax burden, government spending to GDP ratio, and transfers to GDP ratio come from Government Finance Statistics of the IMF.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Religion, income inequality, and the size of the government

et al. 2013

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Recent empirical research has demonstrated that countries with higher levels of religiosity are characterized by greater income inequality. We argue that this is due to the lower level of government services demanded in more religious countries. Religion requires that individuals make financial sacrifices and this leads the religious to prefer making their contributions voluntarily rather than through mandatory means. To the extent that citizen preferences are reflected in policy outcomes, religiosity results in lower taxes, which in turn implies lower levels of spending on both public goods and redistribution. Since measures of income typically do not fully take into account the part of income coming from donations received, this increases measured income inequality. We formalize these ideas in a general equilibrium political economy model and also show that the implications of our model are supported by cross-country data.

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Section: The Effect Of Religiosity On Income Inequalitymentioning

confidence: 97%

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Religion, income inequality, and the size of the government

et al. 2013

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“…They concluded that intergenerational transfers were not an important source of wealth, even for rich families. However, Gale and Scholz (1994), using the 1983 Survey of Consumer Finances, estimated that at least 51 percent of household wealth was accounted for by inheritances and other "intentional" wealth transfers. Brown and Weisbenner (2004), using the 1998 SCF, estimated that 19 percent of households that year received some kind of wealth transfers (this is very close to our own estimate) and that one fifth to one fourth of aggregate household wealth was traceable to wealth transfers, depending on the interest rate used to capitalize past inheritances.…”

Section: Literature Review On Inheritancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Inheritances and the distribution of wealth or whatever happened to the great inheritance boom?

Wolff

Gittleman

2013

J Econ Inequal

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Abstract:We found that on average over the period from 1989 to 2007, 21 percent of American households at a given point of time received a wealth transfer and these accounted for 23 percent of their net worth. Over the lifetime, about 30 percent of households could expect to receive a wealth transfer and these would account for close to 40 percent of their net worth near time of death. However, there is little evidence of an inheritance "boom." In fact, from 1989 to 2007, the share of households reporting a wealth transfer fell by 2.5 percentage points. The average value of inheritances received among all households did increase but at a slow pace, by 10 percent, and wealth transfers as a proportion of current net worth fell sharply over this period from 29 to 19 percent or by 10 percentage points. We also found, somewhat surprisingly, that inheritances and other wealth transfers tend to be equalizing in terms of the distribution of household wealth. Indeed, the addition of wealth transfers to other sources of household wealth has had a sizeable effect on reducing the inequality of wealth. JEL Codes: D31, J15

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“…For the relevance of intergenerational transfers in general concerning household savings, see Kotlikoff (1988). Gale and Scholz (1994) identify transfers from parents to their children as the major part of intergenerational household transfers. 55 There is a vast literature on the employment patterns of single parents compared to couple households, see e.g.…”

Section: Effects Of Income Uncertainty On the Consumption-savings Decmentioning

confidence: 99%

Household Savings Decision and Income Uncertainty

Beznoska

Ochmann

2010

SSRN Journal

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract This paper empirically investigates the effects of changes in the interest rate as well as transitory income uncertainty on households' consumption-savings decision. Applying a structural demand model to German survey data, we estimate the uncompensated interest rate elasticity for savings, in line with the literature, to around zero. Accordingly, any policy-induced variation of net returns to savings is expected to have no significant effects on the level of savings. Moreover, we find significant effects of precautionary savings on the consumption-savings decision. As a result of a doubling of transitory income uncertainty, an average household increases savings by 4.4%. These effects vary by household composition and social status. Terms of use: Documents in

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Intergenerational Transfers and the Accumulation of Wealth

Cited by 462 publications

References 10 publications

Religion, income inequality, and the size of the government

Religion, income inequality, and the size of the government

Inheritances and the distribution of wealth or whatever happened to the great inheritance boom?

Household Savings Decision and Income Uncertainty

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